Our MAG - the number that Texas uses for statewide water planning - is not based on bad modeling. It’s based on somebody giving the state a gargantuan and fictitious number that they literally pulled from the air. I’ve covered this in other stories.

However, Vince Clause told the water board and citizens on Tuesday night that the MAG is based on bad groundwater modeling. Bad groundwater model = totally unrealistic MAG.

Indeed, bad groundwater modeling will get you bad numbers, but that’s not what happened here.

Years ago, someone in the district told the State of Texas that our MAG is 70,000-odd acre feet. But that’s the number of acre feet the district has permitted out, not any actual or calculated amount.

It was not based on how much the permit holders actually pumped. It was not based on a model of our groundwater capacity. It was based on an invention that was decided in court (I don’t have words for how the court set those pumping permit amounts. Maybe one day. I have a chart).

The MAG is actually far smaller than that, more like 10,000 acre feet. Or less. While the state depends on what we tell it, the state actually sets the official number. The new number is coming in the near future, and then we need to decide how to handle the fact that Kinney County has nowhere near the amount of water it says it has in pumping permits.

Learning, teaching and promoting water conservation would help.

Another thing I heard from Clause was the old “it’s too hard” to use the spring to measure anything.

That’s dangerous, folks. Any talk of not counting the spring in measurements or requirements or management zones or drought plans is unacceptable because that will remove a crucial protection from Las Moras Springs. The district won’t be required to maintain a flow at all. We’ve heard it directly from Wes Robinson - board president/top officer/permit holder/early developer of the district from two decades ago - that the district is not obligated to protect springflow.

But it is obligated as long we use spring flow to set our DFC, or desired future condition. And that sets the foundation for all else, including mapping out management zones.

“For management zones to work,” Clause said, “you need (well) water levels to work....one of the things that many GCDs do in Texas is they use monitor levels as trigger wells. And so, right now, we don’t understand how those water levels correlate well to spring flow….”

The dots on this map show production wells that impact Las Moras Springs to varying degrees. Zone 1 is the most closely “correlated”:

Clause was talking about how a grant from Texas Parks and Wildlife - a not-shabby $170,000 - will help the district understand the relationship between well levels and spring flow (for instance, the levels in Tularosa Well on Hwy. 334 some miles north and east of the spring can be used to predict increases in spring flow. Engineer Jim Burton has said many times that if the level of Tularosa goes up after a rain, in so many hours you’ll see Las Moras Spring increase its flow).

Tularosa Well is marked here as “O-01:”

This graph indicates that when the Tularosa falls to around 1190 feet below land surface, Las Moras Springs runs dry:

From the Aug. 25 graphs packet by Jim Burton

But watch out taking too much from that graph. That’s one spot of many that are related to the spring, and we’ve got conservationists saying pumping from ag wells is reducing flow, and we’ve got permitted pumpers saying pumping from the city and fort wells are reducing flow. Yet both of those sets of wells are between Tularosa and the springs. So which is it? Does the spring go dry when Tularosa is low or when the wells are pumped? Or both?

I noticed a mislabel on the map of dots above: #68, Fort Clark MUD Well Number 2, is shown located north of Hwy. 90 when it should be south of Hwy. 90. I’m sure the dot migrated accidentally when somebody was updating the map, but no telling how long ago. #68 in the right spot on the April 2024 map. I only noticed because I was looking for it to tell you where Las Moras Springs is located on the map: Near #68.

Here is the correct location of #68:

From April 2024 graphs packet by Jim Burton

The TPWD grant will go toward studying Las Moras Springs at its basin in the fort pond; looking at the United States Geological Survey gauge downstream from the spring basin (the USGS flow gauge we’ve depended on for many, many years and is the only record we have for historical purposes, but one the district seems to be trying to discount by saying it’s unreliable. Even the district’s own equipment isn’t 100 percent reliable 100 percent of the time); and doing geophysical logs of 10 wells.

Dee Dee Brown asked if any of those wells would be ones that pump between March and September, during growing season and when the spring goes dry.

“The spring goes dry like clockwork,” she said. “It’s not year round.”

Robinson said the individual wells have yet to be chosen.

Whatever they find out with this grant money, the district must protect Las Moras Springs flow. They’re the only ones who can.

And stop it with talk like, “if the board decides to (use) management zones….think about…moving away from springflow…,” Clause said.

If our experts are smart enough to effectively do groundwater science, they’re smart enough to figure out how to measure spring flow as an integer of our entire aquifer system.

Aug. 25, 2026 regular meeting, KCGCD:

Video by Adam Olson for Las Moras Springs Conservation Association

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In fact, there were two candidates in 2010, one who lived on the fort, the other in town, who wanted to run for their precinct seats.

The 63rd Judicial Court ruled that Ida Holley, a fort resident, must be listed on the ballot as a candidate for Precinct 1 in that year’s general election, and Vada Baldree, a Brackettville resident, must be listed on the ballot as a candidate for Precinct 3. And they were.

In the end, the district judge dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction, but we don’t know why because the newspaper at the time doesn’t tell us. An internet search didn’t turn it up either, but I also asked DuckDuckGo if the court actually had jurisdiction, and it said yes:

I clicked on the FindLaw reference on my screen to find the case it referenced and got this:

see the whole thing here:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/tx-court-of-appeals/1152428.html

Even the Texas Attorney General thinks the district court has jurisdiction over the groundwater district. That agency sent me to the Kinney County District Attorney to resolve my complaint about the water district refusing to release a copy of its 2024 DFC report. The district attorney would in turn take the case before the Kinney County 63rd District Court.

But the tale about that wrongfully-withheld DFC report is another story. Oh, the tangled web we weave….

Here are photos of two newspaper articles from the Brackett News. The first is a front page piece on Sept. 9, 2010:

This is the article that mentions “lack of jurisdiction.” Very last line:

Groundwater board candidate Phillip Gordon:

Courtesy photo

Here is Gordon’s email:

From:

scrappy.jonez@icloud.com

To:

Ricardo Alvarado

,

kcgwd1@icloud.com

,

kcgwd3@icloud.com

,

kcgwd4@icloud.com

,

kcgwd2@icloud.com

and 4 more...

Tue, Aug 25 at 10:41 AM

To the KCGCD Board of Directors, General Manager, and Kinney County Clerk:

I am writing regarding the omission of my name from the candidate information/ballot order transmitted by the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District for the November 3, 2026 election.

I timely filed my application for KCGCD Precinct 1 Director on August 17, 2026. The District accepted my filing, and I subsequently received notice concerning the ballot-position drawing. I did not withdraw my candidacy, and I have not received a lawful written rejection of my application or declaration of ineligibility.

I now understand that my name was not included in the information transmitted by KCGCD to the Kinney County Clerk for ballot preparation.

If correct, this is an administrative omission that requires immediate correction, not a lawful basis for removing a timely filed candidate from the ballot.

### The District Has Already Faced This Ballot-Access Issue

This is not an unprecedented issue for KCGCD.

In 2010, Ida Holley, a Fort Clark Springs resident seeking the KCGCD Precinct 1 Director position, and Vada Baldree challenged the District after then-General Manager Ken Carver rejected their applications based upon the District’s interpretation of the residency requirements.

63rd Judicial District Judge Enrique Fernandez ruled that Holley and Baldree were to have their names placed on the November 2010 general-election ballot.

The September 9, 2010 Brackett News reported that Judge Fernandez ordered Holley’s name placed on the ballot for Precinct 1 after finding sufficient grounds to challenge the General Manager’s handling of the application. The court specifically addressed whether the General Manager had followed the proper procedure and relied upon the appropriate public records before rejecting the applications.

The later proceeding concerning ultimate eligibility was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, but that did not remove Holley from the ballot. The November 2, 2010 election proceeded with Ida Holley listed as a Precinct 1 candidate.

That history is particularly significant here.

In 2010, a Fort Clark Springs resident running for KCGCD Precinct 1 was placed on the ballot by judicial order despite the District’s objection to her residency eligibility.

Sixteen years later, KCGCD should not require another Precinct 1 candidate to obtain another emergency court order simply to correct an administrative failure involving ballot access.

### My Present Situation Is Even More Straightforward

Unlike the 2010 candidates, my application was accepted.

I was subsequently contacted concerning the ballot-position drawing.

I have received no timely written rejection establishing a legal basis for excluding me.

The issue now appears to be that my name simply was not transmitted to the County Clerk.

Texas Election Code § 52.094 governs the drawing used to determine the order in which candidate names appear on the ballot. Failure to transmit a candidate’s name during that process does not transform a timely filed candidate into a noncandidate.

Accordingly, I request the following immediate actions:

1. KCGCD confirm in writing that my application for Precinct 1 Director was timely received on August 17, 2026.

2. The appropriate KCGCD filing authority immediately certify and transmit my name to Kinney County Clerk Rick Alvarado as a candidate for Precinct 1 Director.

3. If the ballot-position drawing must be corrected, supplemented, or reconducted because my name was omitted, KCGCD immediately coordinate with the County Clerk and Texas Secretary of State Elections Division to complete that correction.

4. The County Clerk preserve all ballot-production options necessary to permit the correction.

5. Any additional election programming, ballot preparation, printing, legal, or administrative expense caused by KCGCD’s failure to timely transmit my candidacy be borne by the responsible governmental entity and not imposed upon me.

I am not asking anyone to waive a filing deadline or create a new candidacy.

I timely filed.

I am asking the responsible officials to correct what appears to be an administrative omission occurring after my timely filing.

The 2010 Holley matter demonstrates that KCGCD has already been through litigation over attempting to prevent a Fort Clark Springs Precinct 1 candidate from appearing on the ballot. Judge Fernandez ordered ballot access then. There should be no reason to unnecessarily force substantially similar emergency litigation merely to accomplish an administrative correction now.

If KCGCD or the County Clerk believes there is a legal prohibition preventing my name from being added to the ballot, please provide today, in writing, the specific statute, court order, written determination, or other legal authority requiring my exclusion.

Otherwise, I respectfully request immediate correction and transmission of my candidacy.

Because ballot preparation is time-sensitive, please treat this matter as urgent.

Finally, please preserve all records concerning my application, its receipt and review, communications regarding my eligibility, the ballot-position drawing, candidate lists, communications with KCGCD counsel, communications with the Texas Secretary of State Elections Division, and communications between KCGCD and the Kinney County Clerk concerning my candidacy or the November 3, 2026 ballot.

Respectfully,

Phillip Gordon

Candidate, KCGCD Precinct 1 Director

Phillip Gordon ∴ 32º

As an aside, I filed an open records request for the applications of candidates on Tuesday, Aug. 18 but haven’t heard back. So I’ll use the Kinney County Post’s story from Friday, Aug. 21, to give you the list right now.

Precinct 3 incumbent Blake Ward is not running for reelection. Vying for his seat are John Paul Boerschig II and Zachry Hunt Davis.

For Precinct 2, incumbent Ben Lewis, who was appointed last year by county commissioners to fill the unexpired term of Charlie Gaines, is running against Manuel Campos.

For Precinct 1, incumbent Randy Schott is running against Phillip Gordon.

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At present, district office staff include Genell Hobbs, general manager; Bonnie Brotherton, administrative assistant; and Martina Payne, field technician. Also, the district employs a bookkeeper, in addition to its science experts, Jim Burton and others from EcoKai Environmental; and Vince Clause, from Freese & Nichols.

In other action, the board will discuss a donation request from Kinney County to help fund the new little league baseball field complex, being built by Kinney County with a matching grant from Texas Parks and Wildlife.

See an update to that project in this video of an Aug. 21 workshop, attended by Kinney County Judge John Paul Schuster, the county’s grant ladies, various project engineers and others.

Video by Adam Olson for Brackett Community Videos

Other August action by the water board includes regular monthly updates and moving the November and December meeting dates for the holidays.

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Lest we forget… Las Moras Springs in dust, May 2024

Several people over the years have talked about how the rural residency restriction on candidates for Kinney County Groundwater Conservation Water District board of directors is unlawful. After doing a little research, I think they’re right.

Officials with our water authority tell us that of the seven director seats that make up its board, four candidates must live in one of each of the Kinney County precincts, but only in the “rural” parts of the county.

The other three candidates are “at large” positions, one each for Kinney County, the City of Brackettville and Fort Clark’s municipal utility district, FCMUD.

Confusingly, when time comes to vote for these people, every voter here gets to vote for four candidates, no matter where you live, be it in the city, on the fort or out in the county. You cast your vote for the three at-large candidates and the one for your precinct.

Why can’t it be simple? I think the entire board of directors should be at-large on the ballot and everyone here should be able to vote for all seven candidates.

But no. The district - and most of our groundwater - is controlled by four “rural” people who live out in the country, typically on large ranches. The population is thin out there. Most folks under this water district live in town or on the fort, yet there are only three at-large positions available for them to run for.

But then, pointing out the inherent unfairness of this arrangement is futile. This problem needs some legal legs, and in looking around on the internet, I think I may have hit upon something.

A lawyer would have to officially figure this out, but first I have to put the idea out there.

The state legislation that dictates eligibility for directors of the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District reads thus:

Some people say the City of Brackettville and Fort Clark Springs are rural because of their small size. But ChatGPT has another idea, that Section 8846.054 doesn’t prohibit a fort resident from running for a precinct seat.

“The district may interpret it that way, and the legislative structure gives that interpretation some support. But the actual statutory text doesn’t say it,” ChatGPT said.

“And Texas’ unusually strong rule requiring eligibility restrictions to be construed in favor of ballot access makes the ambiguity consequential,” it added.

Just because “municipal” is part of FCMUD’s name, the fort’s MUD isn’t a city. It’s a special utility district designed to serve the Fort Clark Springs homeowners association, with limited powers and no authority even to enact certain laws such as ordinances. It provides water, sewer and trash service, far as I know, with some extras like road striping.

Here’s a screenshot from one of my favorite AI search engines, DuckDuckGo AI:

Wikipedia’s page on special districts says the SUDs provide services not supplied by existing general purpose governments.

In this case, that general purpose government would be the county. And the fort is in the county, not a municipality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_district_(United_States)

ChatGPT continued, “So if ‘rural area’ is not statutorily defined to exclude Fort Clark Springs, the strongest formulation is not merely ‘Fort residents aren’t prohibited.’ It is ’The Legislature demonstrated that it knew Fort Clark Springs existed and knew how to regulate residency there expressly. Its failure to exclude Fort Clark residents from precinct seats should be presumed deliberate, and an administrative body should not add an eligibility restriction the Legislature did not enact.’”

Moreover, “it did not say that a precinct director must reside ‘outside the Fort Clark Springs MUD,’” ChatGPT said.

Chat then offered a bit of lawyerly argument:

If someone - a fort resident who wants to run for a precinct seat - asked to apply for a place on the ballot, “I would seriously question an administrative refusal to put the person on that ballot,” it said.

Further, “Can the election authority conclusively establish from the statute and permissible public records that I am NOT rural?”

Food for thought. It may be up to the water district to prove that you’re not rural.

So, fort residents, if you live in the Precinct 1 portion of FCMUD, you may qualify for a place on the ballot for the November election.

Go ahead and turn in an application and see what they say. If nothing else, this starts the ball rolling on lifting that restriction and opening up the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District to be governed by all, not just the few.

Just to get some perspective on how much rule-of-capture acreage the four of our seven water directors represent, here’s the entire county:

Deadline to turn in your application is 4 p.m. Monday, Aug. 17, at the water district office, first floor of the Masonic Lodge on Ann Street.

Below is a pdf of the application for you to print. You have to be a registered voter and have your application notarized.

Personally, I would love to see some women or Hispanics (Tejanos?) or both run for this office. Black Seminole, too. Lipan Apache, even (Richard Gonzalez, I wish you had requested a recount. Two votes. Two!)

Right now, the board consists of all old white men - well, not all old, but mostly old - and it’s blinding me. Let’s get some equal representation going. You white men make up way less than half the population in this county, yet you run our most powerful government entities.

Let’s get somebody else in there. Somebody who’s serious about saving Las Moras Springs from harm.

W Kcgcd Application For Place On Ballot P1

9.75MB ∙ PDF file

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A screenshot of the Wall Watch homepage:

Big Bend is just one of the latest targets, where as of Friday, Aug. 7, “masked men in bulldozers are flattening the iconic landscape…and protesters are sitting in a 200-year-old cottonwood tree in Southern Arizona, trying to save it from destruction,” wrote Border Chronicle co-founder Melissa del Bosque. “The cottonwood is the last standing of several trees that were already destroyed by private contractors building the border wall.”

Builders are pumping wells dry in New Mexico for concrete and roads, she added, and “in Caliornia, contractors are dynamiting a sacred mountain.”

To allow this work to proceed conveniently, “the Department of Homeland Security has waived all federal laws that would require it to protect the environment and wildlife or to seek input from border communities,” del Bosque wrote.

“This taxpayer megaproject will cost more than the Panama Canal, or the Hoover Dam, to build,” del Bosque wrote in her Wall Watch launch report today, Aug. 11. “And it will continue costing Americans billions to maintain for generations.”

The “wall system” is “two layers of a 30-foot-high wall along with 150-foot-wide enforcement roads, surveillance towers, stadium lights and cameras,” she wrote. “In Texas, this includes a more than 500-mile chain of buoys on the Rio Grande - each buoy weighing a ton - that will serve as a secondary wall.”

This is all funded by us the taxpayers, to the tune of more than $46 billion over three years, she added.

Thing is, nobody knows exactly what’s going in, or where, or when because the administration isn’t sharing information. While masked bulldozer operators chew up Big Bend National Park, the administration claims it’s still in the planning and design stages.

So del Bosque and a number of pros developed Wall Watch, which uses citizen reports to map out projects planned or underway. Anyone is welcome to participate in building this map, if they have observed wall activity of any kind. People in border communities may report sightings of bulldozers, surveillance cameras, piles of construction materials, or other signs of infrastructure or barriers along the border.

In Kinney County, I’ve heard commissioners talk about the surveillance camera or cameras somewhere along our tiny stretch of the Rio Grande riverfront. Maintenance costs us taxpayers about $200,000 a year (county staff have looked for grants to cover it, but that’s only one year at time. The future holds many, many years).

Lo and behold, those surveillance cameras appear on Wall Watch. See this screenshot:

Source: Wall Watch, by the Border Chronicle

Access the map here, learn how to use it and participate in its creation:

https://www.theborderchronicle.com/the-border-chronicle-launches-wall-watch-a-community-powered-mapping-project/?ref=the-border-chronicle-newsletter

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If you’re eligible, that is. This year, the seats coming up for election are purely “rural,” meaning that you have to live outside the boundaries of the City of Brackettville and Fort Clark Springs to qualify. These seats occur in Precincts 1, 2 and 3, in the southwest, northwest and northeast parts of the county.

I finally stumbled across a map from the county showing the city’s boundaries. The fort’s boundaries are easy because it’s fenced. City’s a bit more complicated.

Here’s a precinct map of the entire county:

That’s a lot of rule-of-capture land protected by candidates who make up such a tiny number of the 3,000 taxpayers in this county. Most everyone lives in town or on the fort, but not one of them is eligible to run for these precinct seats. How much of our water is outside the city and fort lines, yet Las Moras Springs, located inside the fort, dries up every year in drought because of pumping out in the rural areas?

Below is the application for a place on the ballot. Note that you have to have it notarized, and the document is public information the minute it’s filed. On a side note, the Brackett school district does something I wish the water district and every other government entity would do, and that’s posting each candidate’s application on its website. They redact the candidate’s birthdate. I don’t know if that is required but it’s fair.

Check out the school’s website:

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:8eddeffa-134f-4066-b516-12264afe16b1

Here’s the application, with instructions:

We need better candidates who will protect our groundwater, even in the face of water marketers who are fighting tooth and nail to keep pumping permits that are much, much larger than the amount of water we have in our aquifers.

The three incumbent board members - permit holder Randy Schott, Blake Ward and Ben Lewis - all have proved they will not try to save Las Moras Springs from harm, despite what they say. Look at their voting records. Every one has even voted to increase groundwater pumping, even though we are already massively overpermitted.

There’s another new permit possibly coming up in the August meeting, which I’m sure these men will vote to allow. We shall see. I think Lewis said he was going to be absent for these next two months.

Pick up an application at the water office, 503 S. Ann St., first floor of the Masonic Lodge.

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Citizens who have fought for years to save Las Moras Springs spoke eloquently at the beginning of this meeting in favor of that wonderful belief of one person, one vote. Please listen to them:

Video by Adam Olson for Las Moras Springs Conservation Association

President Wes Robinson and fellow board directors Matt Bland, Randy Schott and Blake Ward voted to direct attorney Gregory Ellis to write a resolution against legislation that would remove the rural residency restriction on candidates for seats on the water board. At present, if you want to be a candidate for water board in one of our four precincts, you must live outside Brackettville and Fort Clark Springs. Only two of three seats are open to most of the citizens in this county, with the remaining four seats open to just a few citizens because they live out in the country. Mostly on big ranches.

The district’s resolution also opposes formal words that make it the duty of KCGCD to protect Las Moras Springs from harm.

That, folks, says it all. Again. They do not want to protect the spring. Watch what they do, not what they say.

Voting against the majority opposition were David Palmer and Perry Menley. Abstaining was Ben Lewis.

Some of the usual heroes who have spent years fighting for the spring spoke at the July 28 regular meeting, including Teri Marsh, Elizabeth Hodges, Will Conoly, Richard Gonzalez and Gage Brown, all residents of Kinney County. Tully Shahan, a local and one of the original organizers of the water district from more than 20 years ago, also spoke.

Tracy Boulware, a permit holder who is not a local resident, spoke against the proposed legislation.

Travis Huey, local resident and publisher of the Kinney County Post, said he called 74th Texas District Representative Eddie Morales to find out more and asked the board to table the issue.

He said the lawmaker’s office said the proposed bill is a “working draft” and Morales hasn’t decided whether to file it.

“We have one shot at this….we need to make sure we’re presenting exactly what the citizens of this county want and that the district wants as well,” Huey said.

Marsh said after the meeting that if there is any opposition to a local bill, it’s very difficult to get it passed. Often, it will simply languish in committee without ever getting a hearing.

And die. Kind of like Las Moras Springs.

So this legislation is likely not going to go anywhere, and the permittees can maintain their rationale that nobody is going to take 70,000 acre feet of water all at once.

Of course they won’t. They can’t. There isn’t 70,000 acre feet to be had. Seems there isn’t even 70,000 acre feet of space down there. That’s why we can get billions of gallons of water in a rainstorm but most of it runs off to other places. Since the flood in mid-July, during which one area of the county - the northeast sector - reported some 24 inches of rain, whatever has soaked into the ground is still moving beneath our feet. There’s not space for it all. That’s why we get artesian springs that flow out of the ground.

Nature has an elegant way to deliver water to us, but it’s never been enough. So we drill wells and suck it out and lower the aquifer levels, and the natural delivery system dries up.

But our current MAG, our guess as to how much water we have at our disposal at any one time, claims we do have 70,000 acre feet of space down there. The size of our pumping permits reflects that fiction.

We likely have much, much less space than that, as demonstrated by Las Moras Springs drying up in drought when pumpers take some 10,000 acre feet for irrigation and for sale.

Just the two biggest permit holders (there are about 45 permittees) in the county have enough rights to sell nearly three times that.

But, we’re told, they have to use it for beneficial use. Well, that means all they need is a buyer.

How hard is it to find a buyer for water in this state?

That’s how all this started in the first place. Water sales. Water marketing. Potential for big, big money.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Tully Shahan told the board how the district came to be, more than 20 years ago.

He noted that Robinson was involved then, as was Matt Bland. He said Blake Ward was there too.

To form a water district, the citizens of a county have to vote on it, he said. In the end, about 84 percent of Kinney County voters said yes.

But to get to that point, the conservationists (Shahan, a permit holder and pumper himself, is also conservationist) and the pumpers grappled over the “rural” residency restriction for candidates living in the county precincts.

The pumpers wanted that language written into the legislation while the conservationists wanted it removed.

(Note that Ellis told the board there is no other groundwater district in the state that restricts candidacy this way).

“So in trying to get together and get 100 percent support of our district, we agreed to leave it in there, because what they told us was if you don’t take it out, we’re going to lobby against it when it goes to Austin. And we’ll kill your bill,” Shahan said.

“So to get a groundwater district, we chose to go this route,” he said.

And that’s also what’s happening today, 20-odd years later, with the same old people fighting against fair representation.

Before Shahan took the floor, Boulware spoke and said she researched how much citizens actually pay toward supporting this district. She found that of all the 3,000 or so taxpayers here, of the $600,000 or so paid in property taxes, industry pays the most. City and fort residents pay a mere 12 percent of tax dollars, about $77,000 a year; farmers and ranchers pay about 9 percent, or $51,000 a year; and industry, utilities and multiuse farms pay 77 percent, some $378,000 to $450,000 in taxes.

Boulware added that the majority shouldn’t rule over the few.

Shahan rebutted Boulware.

“You don’t base representation on income,” he said. “You base it on equal protection under the law under the Voting Rights Act.”

He added that 60 to 65 percent of people here are Hispanic, and some 90 percent of them live in Brackettville or Fort Clark Springs.

“You need to correct this error where you don’t have full representation, even for the Hispanic community,” he said. “How can these people run? They don’t live in the outlying areas. They live in Brackettville. They work at REA (Rio Grande Electric Co-op). They work at Fort Clark.

“To deny these eligible people to vote, to deny them the right to be a candidate for any of these offices, this provision of ‘reside in rural area’ needs to be removed.”

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So members of the current board - the members who are in power, that is - appear appalled and have announced their opposition to this action.

It’s on the agenda for Tuesday’s regular meeting, July 28, at 6 p.m.

See item 8. I mean, they’re doing a resolution, for pity’s sake:

The citizen’s group is trying to get a legislative bill passed on our specific water district that would allow more people to run for office. KCGCD has an odd way of electing candidates in that it restricts candidacy so severely that only four people control policy over something like 80 percent of the groundwater here.

Those four live in the rural areas of the county, outside the boundaries of the City of Brackettville and Fort Clark Springs.

And right now, three of those directors - plus the countywide director and the city director - have been voting against measures that would impose restrictions on water use in times of drought. That’s five of seven.

Not good.

And not fair if the majority of Kinney County residents want control of their groundwater. And Las Moras Springs, by the way.

Here are the rules that cover the creation of the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District. For purposes of this article, see “eligibility:”

https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._spec._dist._local_laws_code_title_6_subtitle_h_chapter_8846

Here’s the proposed bill to change candidacy. The main thing is it crosses out the line “resides in rural area.”

I’m not sure about inserting a line about the duty to protect Las Moras Springs, although I see the point. Once, moons ago, the groundwater district’s mission specifically included a line about protecting the springs. Somewhere along the way that disappeared.

But the spring is protected already, as long as the few permit holders who are fighting against drought restrictions don’t arrange to remove Las Moras Springs from our DFC target. And don’t remove Las Moras Springs from GMA 7, where most of the groundwater pumping occurs.

Some 3,000 people in Kinney County pay taxes to this district. Nearly all of them live in the city or on the fort, yet don’t enjoy the same representation as the fewer than 20 percent or so of taxpayers who live in the county.

Wholly unfair.

If you attend Tuesday’s meeting, ask Wes Robinson, the board president, about how he was one of those who wrote the original restrictive rules for candidacy. It has been said that the intent was to give rural residents a fair shot at candidacy. Turns out, it tilts the playing field in favor of the dozen or so permit holders who pump large quantities of water from our county. Some of them hold permits large enough to destroy our aquifers, especially if they are ever allowed to sell water out of the county.

A board that favors pumpers can easily approve permits to sell water outside the county. The current board has already granted an existing permit holder more water than she had before - for sale within the county - and granted another landowner a new permit to also sell water commercially, same way. It’s not a long ride to selling water outside the county.

We need representation that will preserve our groundwater, not representation that is poised to make money from its use or sale.

Every registered voter in the city and on the fort can make their wishes about this clear. Enough votes will change how we protect our groundwater, now and for the future.

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This time around has to do with careless or deliberate mis-posting of an agenda. This meeting is a moot point because they can’t meet because the agenda is posted illegally.

It’s the agenda for the first meeting of the fifth drought committee formed in recent years to pretend they’re trying to save Las Moras Springs.

Three of those committees were serious about developing a drought plan and saving the spring. Two, including this latest one, are not.

As an aside, the top officer of the water board, Wes Robinson, killed off two of the serious committees, but you can read about that in earlier Brackett Beacons.

The July 23 meeting is illegal because Texas law requires government entities to post meetings three full business days ahead of time. That law is new as of last September. It used to be 72 hours ahead of time.

The meeting should have been posted by Friday, July 17, unless it’s emergency and all the board members agree to it.

Note the clerk’s stamp at the bottom of the agenda is July 20, too late for the Thursday schedule announced on the document. We have laws about lawful posting for a reason, even at this small level of government:

The board talked about this months ago with its lawyer, Gregory Ellis, in an open meeting. So Robinson, who posted the Thursday meeting himself, knows better.

He’s an intelligent man. There’s no way Robinson doesn’t know this rule. When the law became official last September, it was the subject of much discussion to figure out what “three full business days” actually means.

Posting at lunchtime Monday does not constitute a full business day. And the day of the meeting doesn’t count, either.

So this mis-posting is the same old trickery. Delay delay delay. As always.

(Maybe it’s a different trick: the fact that this new committee of three does not make a quorum so technically it’s not an official meeting. But that would be worse because that makes this posting a lie. Hmm).

When I researched the law, I used DuckDuckGo AI to start with. It was a good lesson in learning how to ask questions so to get a proper answer.

I asked the same question three different ways and in one instance it gave me the wrong answer. DuckDuckGo AI used a reference from old law, not current law.

Goes to show that anyone researching using AI needs to be mindful of the answers and question every one.

But I got some good answers. Here are screenshots of my questions and the robot’s response.

First answer:

Second answer:

I won’t put in the one with the wrong answer just because.

But here’s a chart for your viewing convenience. This was published before the law took effect:

Source: Jackson Walker at jw.com

So now we’re left with the question of whether this meeting constitutes an emergency, in which case the new committee would be in its rights to hold this meeting.

Is a drought committee meeting an emergency? It is, actually, because the spring will die one day. But that’s a different kind of emergency.

Did all the committee members agree to the meeting? I guess so, since there were only three of them, Wes Robinson, Matt Bland and Randy Schott (“a whole of the governing board”).

But it would still be illegal because the agenda title doesn’t say it’s an emergency.

First question:

Second question:

This is a total waste of taxpayer money and time.

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Hear the quote here, at about timestamp 39:30:

Video by Adam Olson for Las Moras Springs Conservation Association

Las Moras Springs is at risk of death if we don’t get pro-spring candidates to run for the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District Board of Directors. Current directors keep showing us - openly - they’re not going to save the spring.

They keep fighting hard against the slightest move toward curtailing extraction of our precious groundwater, not in drought, not for a minute, not one drop. Multiple directors have done this for years.

We need to pay attention. Las Moras Springs, the ninth largest spring in Texas, will never be as important to Kinney County water marketers - our own permit holders - as it is to all the rest of us.

Only two of our seven current directors, David Palmer and Perry Menley, have shown genuine, consistent interest in saving the springs.

So now, we have a contest coming up in November in which three of those director seats are set to expire. None of them currently are filled by people who show true concern about the fate of the springs.

They are rural Precincts 1, 2 and 3, “rural” because candidates must live outside the boundaries of the City of Brackettville and Fort Clark Springs to be eligible to run for these seats.

That leaves very few people who can be candidates, in charge of most of our groundwater, under hundreds of thousands of acres of land. That’s important because of rule of capture: if you own land you can extract water from this county, no matter how it affects everyone else.

Yes, we have rules regulating extraction, but this water board will never regulate extraction enough to save Las Moras Springs.

Directors up for reelection are Randy Schott, Pct. 1; Ben Lewis, Pct. 2; and Blake Ward, Pct. 3.

Lewis was appointed by the Kinney County Commissioners Court to fill the unexpired term of Charlie Gaines, a director who was very interested in saving the spring. But the new appointment effectively quashed any chance of having enough votes for actions like creating a drought contingency plan. Lewis has said very little in open meetings in the months he’s been serving, but his voting record shows his lack of interest in saving the spring.

Schott says we’re not overpemitted, nor do we need to do anything to change the status quo.

Ward says very little, like Lewis, and his voting record shows the same lack of interest. Over about the last year and a half, he has looked into the drought-mitigation proposal of brush clearing, but I haven’t heard anything concrete about assisting landowners with costs or even encouraging folks with education programs. I think Schott handed out a flyer in the June regular meeting, but there’s nothing on the district website and the board has not discussed it in any detail.

Here is the public notice calling for candidates to sign up for the November 2026 race. Filing begins on Monday, July 20 and runs to Monday, Aug. 17. Pick up applications at the district office Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.

From the Kinney County Post, July 9, 2026

Kinney County’s precinct map. I’ve tried to get people to give me a detailed map with the city’s boundaries but no luck. The fort boundaries are easier to find because they have a fence.

We know they’ll never protect the springs because of what they do. Watch that video I’ve linked above. It was totally acrimonious. Robinson walked out before it was over. And it was about saving the spring.

That drought plan meeting, held June 9, was a committee meeting that included all seven directors. Present were David Palmer, committee chairman; Wes Robinson, Randy Schott, Ben Lewis and Perry Menley. Absent were Matt Bland and Blake Ward.

“We need to start doing something,” Palmer said. “Doing nothing, Wes, is not an option.”

“What are you suggesting, David?” Robinson said.

“I’m suggesting that we put together a drought management plan —”

“Blanket cuts all the way across the county,” Robinson interrupted.

“I’m suggesting that if I was drawing up a drought plan, I would model (it) after a drought plan that works, and Barton Springs works,” Palmer said.

“It works in Barton Springs,” Robinson said. “Doesn’t mean it would work here.”

“It works there,” Palmer said, “but something similar would work here.”

“Oh, you think it would?” Robinson said. “That’s your opinion.”

“If you don’t try anything, nothing will get done,” Menley said.

“Who - we’re doing a lot of stuff, Perry,” Robinson said. “You’re not involved in it because you never come into the office.”

Palmer then told Robinson he “would challenge you, Wes, to come up with what you think we should do… and Randy, you said we don’t need to do anything.”

Schott nodded.

“Ben, I don’t know what you think it should look like, but… I think… you understand we should do something around here, with Vince’s help.”

Vince Clause is our current hydrogeologist, hired to replace the district’s longtime hydrogeologist Dr. Bill Hutchison, who resigned suddenly 18 months ago.

Robinson said that Palmer only wants curtailment.

“You don’t want to do anything but that,” he said. “You don’t want to do rainfall enhancement. You don’t want to look at alternative sources of water. You don’t want to look at conjunctive use. You think the whole solution is to cut!”

Clause talked about the Barton Springs plan, which uses both springflow and water levels to determine drought triggers. There are multiple levels of triggers (the same as our city and the fort), which cuts pumpers back depending on their permit class (our pumpers also are categorized by various levels of entitlement).

Clause added that there has been decades of research by PhDs (here too. Kinney County taxpayers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. We just spent another $20,000-plus on water chemistry instruments for EcoKai engineer Jim Burton at the regular June 23 meeting. I really need to do another gadget story. Those are fun).

“So these things aren’t easy,” Clause said. “They do take time… and we are as a district working in the right direction.”

Same old song. Complicated. Takes time. Hard to do.

While we taxpayers continue to pay and pay and pay. And watch the spring die, little by little, over the years.

“Should we include the word ‘curtailment’ and have some guidelines set out for when all the stuff we do every day doesn’t work, we do some more things?” Palmer asked.

Robinson then tossed in another wrench.

“I think curtailment is reserved for whenever you have detrimental use occurring… if you are impacting the spring to the point that you dried it up, that’s detrimental.”

Exactly.

“And you don’t think that’s happening?” Palmer asked.

“I said I don’t know if it’s happening. I don’t know if it’s happening or not, but you think it is,” Robinson said.

“There is pumping that is affecting the spring in a negative way,” Palmer said.

In fact, Dr. Hutchison has told us that if pumping were curtailed, springflow would increase. Something like cutting pumping by half - roughly 4,000 acre feet - would increase springflow by 1-8 cubic feet per second. When you’re talking a general springdribble of 2 cfs - lately, before this last rain - that’s significant: the least projected increase is 50 percent.

Robinson then said Fort Clark Springs Association was at fault for detrimental use because of its pool, its state of disrepair and the function of its impoundment gate, adding that the fort “is breaking its surface water permit.”

He said that has been reducing springflow (springflow downstream of the spring base and pool. The spring base is in a pond just before the pool and then pool water flows into Las Moras Creek).

“There’s no water coming out of the pool. And the only reason you have 2 cfs was because of what was leaking around the gate and flowing underneath the pool… if the gate was open, you would have more than 2 cfs,” Robinson said.

Palmer disagreed.

In an email, I asked Dr. Robert Mace, longtime water scientist and director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos, for his opinion.

“Anything that restricts flow downstream [which seems to be what they are saying?] would increase water levels in the pond, and any increase in water levels in the pond would decrease springflow. The gage is downstream so regardless of what is happening with the flow in and around the pool, the gage is catching it.

“Filling the pool would decrease downstream flow until it is filled and emptying the pool would increase downstream flows until it was empty [the yin would be yanged over the long term],” Mace wrote.

He added that Dr. Ron Green, a consultant with the Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio who has also studied extensively and written about Kinney County’s aquifers, and USGS - the United States Geological Survey, which operates the springflow gauge - would also be good sources to ponder this question. I need to revisit this in the future. Ask the fort, too.

Palmer noted that twice, we didn’t meet our spring flow target DFC (desired future condition) - in 2023 and 2025. We barely met it in 2024.

When Palmer described the district’s newly adopted DFC (15 cfs annual average flow averaged over five years) and that whether we can meet it remains a question, Robinson laughed.

“People are gonna fight it,” Robinson said.

I’m thinking that permit holders - certain of them, not all of them - will fight any legal requirement that Las Moras Springs flows at all. Those permit holders include Robinson and Schott, both majorly in charge of water district policy, and others such as Tracy Boulware of the Toledo Boulware trust permit (11,057 af), and Dennette Orwig of the Elm Creek permit (12,673 af).

Others, such as Beth Ann Smith of the Langston Ranch permit, just got 50 acre feet added to her already substantial pumping permits of 2,290 af.

They’re already trying to remove the spring from our DFC targets and only use well levels, and they’re trying to get the spring located out of the boundaries of GMA 7 (where most of their pumps are, including Robinson and Schott’s) and relocated to within the boundaries of GMA 10 (where there is little permitted pumping)

Or, best idea yet, label GMA 7 “non-relevant for planning purposes” even though it contains 99 percent of all the permitted wells in the county.

See for yourself where the high volume wells are located in GMA 7 and GMA 10:

Several permittees, including Orwig and Boulware and Robinson, have spoken in open meetings about how the spring should be in GMA 10 rather than GMA 7.

The biggest pumper is Lance Saathoff of Hondo, who appears to lease a good number of wells and owns his own permit for 3103.98 af, according to water district records.

Caveat time: This is NOT to say Saathoff is killing the spring.

Other permittees who have pumped substantial amounts lately (2020 to 2024) include - not in any order - Zack and Kayla Davis, Jim McDaniel, Charlie Foust, Jamie Rains, Tully and Darlene Shahan, Curtis Boehme and Bobby Patton of Maverick Land & Cattle.

Far as I can tell from district records, seven of the 12 permit holders I’ve mentioned live in Kinney County. The rest live elsewhere.

Another permittee, JR Hamilton of the JRED pemit, is named in a lawyer letter back in 2024 basically telling the district to stop it with the drought plans. That letter also named the Davises and the McDaniels. Tracy Boulware’s lawyer wrote a separate letter.

Stop it or else.

Hamilton is another permit holder who appears to live in another county, and in all the pumping records that I have gathered from 2020 forward, it seems his records appear nowhere. In a spreadsheet submitted to the Texas Water Development Board by our engineer Jim Burton, the cells for the amounts pumped from the JRED wells are blank or contain question marks.

This graphic contains most of the permits. Some of the permit numbers are missing. Many permits include several wells. To get the total amount of the permit in acre feet, add “historic” and “existing” together. “R” is commercial.

It’s disingenuous to say that we can’t figure this out.

We know now how much water we can spare before the spring goes dry. We can extrapolate how much we can take before exhausting our reserves, and now we’ve done it in real time.

We’ve had major drought to outdrought all droughts since the 1950s plus pumping roughly 10,000 acre feet every year plus heat and evaporation.

When we do that, Las Moras Springs, the ninth largest spring in Texas, turns into a dry hole.

And all of Kinney County suffers for it.

I’ve been waiting for the board to announce its next drought committee meeting but I think that wait will be in vain.

After the acrimony meeting, Robinson issued an email to directors removing Palmer as chairman and dissolving the committee (drought committee number four, I think, in three years). I asked Palmer about this. He said Robinson said a new committee would be appointed at the next regular meeting.

Robinson indeed formed drought committee number five at the regular June meeting. He called for volunteers. Palmer and Menley didn’t offer, and Lewis said he was going to be gone for the next two months.

The newest drought committee was born during the regular June 23 meeting:

Video by Adam Olson for Las Moras Springs Conservation Association

So the new committee consists of Robinson, Schott and Bland. Schott said he couldn’t attend right away because he had haying to do.

But that was June 23 and now it’s July 18. No meeting has been posted.

They aren’t interested.

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Every five years, the Texas Water Development Board requires groundwater conservation districts to adopt a DFC, or desired future condition, a health goal of aquifers based on flow from a spring or the water level in a well. From that, the state sets a MAG volume, or modeled available groundwater volume, for each water district within the respective groundwater management areas (there are 16 in the state). The MAG is a best guess of how much water is underground at any given time.

The Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District has to adopt two DFCs, because we’re located in two different GMAs. Last month we dealt with GMA 7, which includes Las Moras Springs. Tomorrow, it’s Tularosa Well in GMA 10, located in central northeast Kinney County.

Citizens may speak about the Tularosa DFC at the public hearing (be sure to put your comments in writing) or may submit written comments to the district office anytime until Saturday, Aug. 29 (not sure why it’s a Saturday, but that’s what the public notice says).

Those comments will then be sent for review to the GMA 10 coordinating district, Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer Conservation District (it says that nowhere in supporting documents, but that’s what has to happen for this process to proceed).

Check out information on the BSEACD here:

https://bseacd.org

The Tularosa Well DFC remains the same this time around, unlike the Las Moras Springs DFC, which underwent a major overhaul this year.

Still, everyone is encouraged to read the water science documents and participate in the public process if they wish.

The memo below is the report on how we met the DFC target for Tularosa Well last year but failed the DFC target for Las Moras Springs. The memo appears twice on the KCGCD’s website, once in the regular board meeting slot for May 26 as “DFC for 2025” and again in the public hearing slot for July 7 as “technical memorandum.”

The memo is the same in both places. See pages 3 and 4 for the lines relevant to the Tularosa Well DFC.

The GMA 10 public hearing is set for Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the water district office. Members of the water board are not required to attend.

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Schizophrenic springs, comparing last year (light line) to this (blue line):

From waterdata.usgs.gov. “Dws” means “downstream”

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-08456310/#period=P90D&compare=true&dataTypeId=continuous-00060-0&showFieldMeasurements=true

On the agenda is a call for the November election, as three seats on the water board will expire this year, including Pct. 1, held by Randy Schott; Pct. 2, held by Ben Lewis; and Pct. 3, held by Blake Ward.

Lewis is filling the unexpired term of Charlie Gaines, who resigned last August after the board voted to change the monthly meeting date. The night he resigned, Gaines said that when he was elected he cleared four years’ worth of second Wednesdays, the regular meeting date. With his other obligations, he couldn’t change his schedule easily.

I can imagine, if you already cleared four years’ worth of time to serve the public. But Wes Robinson, the board’s top officer, didn’t offer to put the date back, nor would he even postpone the change until the end of the year so Gaines could rearrange his schedule for the final year of his term.

It was an unfair thing to do.

So here we are, with meetings on the fourth Tuesdays now and a duly elected director gone. One who wanted to protect the springs and worked many extra hours on a drought contingency plan (which others on the board summarily dismissed, by the way).

What we need are more directors who want to protect Las Moras Springs - the ninth largest spring in Texas - from destruction due to being dried up every spring and summer. It’s pretty dire right now. We’ve gotten a lot of rain this spring, yet the spring isn’t springing back. It came back for a bit in April but then fell into decline again. Scary.

And most on the board continue to fight against pumping restrictions, which could help the spring in those months that it runs dry. The incumbents say they want to protect the spring, but their actions belie their words.

Watch the directors carefully these next few months and decide for yourself if they really want to save the spring. Or do they want to save our permit holders from having to cut back on water use? Ever. At all. Even a drop.

I marvel at how strenuously these men resist any notion of pumping curtailment. One, Randy Schott, is a permit holder himself, so I can see his resistance. But the other two?

We need folks running for these seats who want to save our famous springs. They must live in the rural parts of the precincts - outside the boundaries of the City of Brackettville or Fort Clark Springs - so it’s difficult to find candidates. Much of our rural area is owned by absentee landowners. Sad that so much of our groundwater is controlled by so few people.

There’s lots more on the agenda. See below.

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This hearing is in addition to a three-month period in which citizens may submit written comments about that springflow target, which is meant to help us track how healthy our aquifers are. The timeframe closes on Monday, August 2 (some of the other water districts within our groundwater management area are also taking comments on their DFCs, but will close their comment period on July 31. It makes a confusing public process all the more confusing. Why is that?)

By the way, our hydrogeologist told the KCGCD board just last week that our aquifer is “very unhealthy.” He used the singular to describe it but that’s because he was referring to the Edwards Trinity (Plateau) Aquifer during a drought committee meeting last week. That’s the aquifer that provides most of the water for Kinney County.

The hearing begins at 6 p.m. at the water office, 503 S. Ann St. in the Masonic Lodge building.

From the Kinney County Post

Keep in mind that the board of directors is not required to attend this meeting, or any other public hearing, oddly. Water district staff will be there because somebody has to open the door.

For a review of how the Las Moras Springs DFC figures in your life, see my last story on it and how we got a fantasy MAG figure, or modeled available groundwater figure:

https://thebrackettbeacon.substack.com/p/public-asked-to-comment-on-new-dfc

If you attend tomorrow’s meeting to make a verbal comment, write it down so you can hand it in for the record.

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Now I can just send it to your email box whenever I need to.

The public comments hearing on our new DFC will be held on June 16. When the water district posts its announcement I’ll post a new post about what time of day it will be.

Karst paperweights:

Photo by Carolea Hassard

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Texas Water Development Board graphic

Periodically, groundwater conservation districts in Texas must review the way they’re managing our aquifers, and a big part of that is setting a target - a DFC, or desired future condition - that GCDs can aim for to keep aquifers healthy over time.

That timeframe is 50 years, which allows a lot of wiggle room for low water levels to creep in. So GCDs must revisit their target at least every five years.

The Texas Water Development Board manages this process. In addition to approving a water district’s DFC, the state also sets the district’s MAG, or modeled available groundwater, which tells a district how much it can permit to be pumped from the ground.

The redo - they call it a planning cycle - started this year, and it’s going to take a while. First, Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District must send its proposed DFC to our Groundwater Management Area group of 21 fellow groundwater districts. That would be GMA 7, one of the two GMAs we belong to (the other is GMA 10).

Texas Water Development Board graphic

Kinney County’s boundaries:

Freese and Nichols graphic

GMAs operate under the auspices of the Texas Water Development Board.

GMA 7 will then approve (likely) our DFC, by Jan. 5, 2027. The GMA then has 60 days to submit a report to the TWDB board, which then has 90 days to cure any problems it finds. Then, looks like, the GMA has 180 days to set the MAGs for the individual districts.

That takes us to the end of 2027, if I’ve got my calendar right.

Then each district is allowed a period of time to officially insert the new DFC into its management plan, and then change its rules if needed.

So this takes years.

But it gets worse. If would be nice if government bureaucracy were easy to explain, but no.

For 90 days from May 1 or May 5 - depending on who you read - you are invited to make comments on KCGCD’s shiny new DFC. You can submit comments by mail or email to the Kinney County district, which will pass those comments on to the GMA 7.

Sounds easy, right? Public comments, due by the end of July.

But there’s a twist. You are also invited to attend a public hearing, set for Friday, June 19, at the district office, to make public comment on the new DFC in person or in writing. These, too, will be passed on to the GMA 7 official for review (she would be Meredith Allen, of the Sutton County Underground Water Conservation District).

So where can we send our comments? If you attend the June 19 public hearing, it would be best to write down your comments to hand in personally.

Otherwise, send your comments to:

KCGCD

PO Box 369

Brackettville, TX 78832

or email to:

kinneyh2o@att.net

So what’s our new proposed DFC?

“Daily mean spring discharge measured at Las Moras Springs shall not be less than 15 cfs (cubic feet per second) when averaged over five years.”

The board chose this formula at its March 3 meeting, if you want more details:

Video by Adam Olson for Las Moras Springs Conservation Association

Here’s a paragraph from the hydrogeologists’ revised DFC paper (we merit two hydrogeologists, Vince Clause and Alyssa Suydam Sule):

“The current DFC for the Edwards-Trinity (Plateau) Aquifer in the GMA 7 portion of Kinney County was originally adopted in 2010 and was based on results from the Texas Water Development Board’s Kinney County groundwater model. The model assumed a constant annual withdrawal of 77,000 acre feet per year and reported simulated end-of-year Las Moras Springs discharge statistics of 24.4 cubic feet per second (median) and average of 23.9 cfs (mean).

“Since adoption of the original DFC, management challenges have emerged due to the evolving interpretations of the DFC, the difficulty of evaluating a model-based year-end spring discharge target, and an apparent disconnect between modeled outcomes and observed conditions. During the ongoing drought, Las Moras Springs has repeatedly gone dry during spring and summer months even though reported groundwater pumping has remained well below the Modeled Available Groundwater (MAG) associated with the current DFC.

These conditions contributed to community concern and highlighted the need for a clearer, more observable DFC framework. As a result, the KCGCD Board engaged FNI [Freese and Nichols Inc] to assist with MAG considerations and, after multiple Board meetings and public discussions, ultimately worked towards development of a revised DFC for the Kinney County portion of GMA 7.”

In short, our aquifer management plan was based on an outrageously inflated MAG and an overly complex DFC formula.

The MAG wasn’t even based on reality. It wasn’t based on pumping amounts. It was based on permitted amounts, which was the oh-so-wrong thing to do.

Here’s the revised DFC paper, all 200 pages. As an aside, when I requested this document under the Freedom of Information Open Records Act, the district sent me a certified letter saying they would charge me over $70 for it and the district’s annual audit, but once I paid, they’d be happy to email it to me.

Then they posted the revised DFC paper on their website, so I just snagged it from there. For nothing (haven’t found the audit on the website, though).

Click here for the entire 200 pages:

revised DFC paper

The MAG - modeled available groundwater, what we think we have to spare - will take longer to fix, because Clause needs to do a model to back up his numbers. He won’t have that until the end of the year, so we’re asking the state to allow us to do a placeholder MAG instead:

“In advance of an updated groundwater flow model, FNI recommends that TWDB consider an interim, data-driven MAG estimate informed by pumping during years that would have met the revised DFC.

“Based on available data, the 75th percentile of pumping during DFC-attainment years is 9,610 acre feet per year, which provides a reasonable planning-level value that balances water supply needs with spring discharge objectives.”

In short, would the TWDB please let us use a MAG of 9,610 af until we get that model.

Remember, we have been telling everybody that we have 77,000 af of water available to pump every year. With actual pumping around 10,000 af a year and the spring going dry, I wonder if we have less than 9,610 af to spare.

The placeholder MAG is based on pumping done in years past, but using the new DFC formula. Trouble is, we’ve already been failing the new DFC since the board voted on it in March.

This is in light of that fact that legally, Kinney County pumpers are permitted to take about 68,000 af every year no matter what.

Or more. I question that permitted amount, because I have a figure from the old hydrogeologist of about 63,000 af. But adding up figures from a spreadsheet I personally got from the district, the total is 85,431 af (that’s 27,921 af in existing permits plus 57,510 in historical permits). I don’t recall who gave me the 68,000 figure.

Whatever the total is, it’s many times more than our aquifers can offer at any given time.

And most members of the the current water board are steadily increasing that total. They’ve done it twice and recently took a request to permit even more. That request is expected to come before the board in the future (who wants to bet that Wes Robinson, Randy Schott, Matt Bland, Blake Ward and Ben Lewis will vote in favor of that?)

Something’s wrong here, and it’s not just dry weather.

Listening to the water board meetings, I’m hearing more and more the old excuse that since it’s dry, of course we’re using more water.

So the permittees get to use more water when it’s bone dry.

What about those on the Brackettville city and Fort Clark Springs water supplies who are asked to curtail their use when low aquifer levels trigger drought restrictions?

Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District - which controls most of the water around here - won’t ask its 47 permit holders to curtail their use during drought.

Caveat time: Fort Clark Springs has one of those permits but polices itself regarding drought. The city is grandfathered and holds no permit.

The city and the fort, with nearly 3,000 people depending on the same aquifers as KCGCD permittees, ask their residents to curtail use during drought.

Moreover, of the 47 permit holders in this county, fewer than 10 are doing the most pumping, drawing down the water table faster than it can recharge (I would know better how many permittees it is if I could get the most recent pumping records, but the district wants to charge me unlawfully to provide them. More on that in another story).

Do the math: that’s 10 people who take the most water from a county that has more than 3,000 taxpayers. Taxpayers who pay by law to protect these pumpers’ right to take that water.

We are totally dependent on this groundwater for our lives, yet we can’t ask those heavy users to curtail their use because they need it to give their plants more water.

And the district has no official way to make them stop it because doesn’t have a drought plan.

To not improve this conundrum, Clause has said that Kinney County, because it’s located at the far southern end of the Edwards Trinity (Plateau) Aquifer, our use is “expected to have limited influence on aquifer conditions elsewhere in the management area.”

See Groundwater Management Area 7 map at top.

The management area is GMA 7 and includes 21 water districts. That means people other than just us Kinney Countians depend on this ET(P)A. Yet we pump our little part of it dry every summer.

Our old hydrogeologist, Dr. Bill Hutchison, told us that if you pump hard enough in the south of a formation you can impact the levels to the north.

Wonder what our fellow districts have to say about that?

The state and our fellow GMA 7 water districts have been laboring under this false information of the huge MAG for 16 years. That means we have misled other water districts and the state for a very long time.

Worse, not only will the DFC not be officially corrected until 2028, after the revision makes its way through bureaucracy, a new MAG won’t be figured until Clause completes his groundwater flow model. The new model won’t come until the end of the year.

The new MAG will be figured too late for the 2026 joint planning cycle. Next cycle is 2031. But if the state allows KCGCD to at least change to a MAG of 9,610 af for now, that’s a plus.

It’s just that at one point, Clause suggested a MAG of only 6,200 af a year, from statistics based on the old DFC of 24-something cfs.

In part, he based that figure on pumping from 2003 to 2024. But 2003 was before meters, so we only have the pumpers’ word on how much they took that year.

Pumpers simply figured their gallons based on how much their pump pumped (say, 100 gallons a minute) and then tracked the time by looking at their electric bills to see how many kilowatts they used that month. Or something.

So we don’t know how much was pumped in 2003. Not really.

I think we really don’t know how much has been pumped in other years, either. Take a look at these various graphs that show pumping totals:

It’s difficult to tell just how many acre feet are represented here but you can see they’re all different. The top two graphs are from documents by Vince Clause, the bottom graph is by Bill Hutchison.

Then there’s the uncertainty graph:

Bill Hutchison, from the 2023 management plan

Time will tell whether a MAG of 9,610 af or 6,200 af is more accurate.

But there’s still that niggly thing of how much water permittees are permitted to pump out of here. Remember? 63,000 af? 85,000 af? Every year?

Hutchison said that if the MAG (he meant 77,000 af) were pumped, the spring is gone.

Clause said much the same thing.

But even with a new MAG and a new DFC, we have a bunch of permits big enough to destroy our aquifers. Legally.

How do we get out of that?

This is a composite of Las Moras springflow from 1896, by Robert Mace and The Graduate Student Known as Corinne. My point here is that the spring springs along until halfway through the last century and then starts bottoming out. Then, in the last few years, it routinely bottoms out.

Graphic from https://sosecretoccultandconcealed.com/2026/06/08/deep-water-shallow-water-old-water-young-water/

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Could springflow recession curves help tell us what’s happening?

Illustration from Dr. Mace’s timely tale

Read the story here:

https://sosecretoccultandconcealed.com/2026/06/08/deep-water-shallow-water-old-water-young-water/

Dr. Mace is executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

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Several of us were hunting on the Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District website for an announcement of the next drought plan committee meeting, but it didn’t appear until this morning, just a day before it’s set to be held.

Officially, water district officials filed it with the county clerk the morning of June 4 (see the stamp on the notice below), but those of us who depend on the district’s website for such notices were left in the dark until today.

Meeting begins at 6 p.m.

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Help activists stop or at least slow down construction of one of the four massive new transmission lines that the State of Texas has blessed to mar our beautiful state.

The power industry wants to plant the Howard-Solstice line between San Antonio and Fort Stockton, slicing through the middle of Kinney County across untouched wild country, rather than follow existing rights-of-way.

It’s cheaper for them, evidently.

Hill Country Preservation Coalition is hosting their fundraising event at 5 p.m. Saturday, May 30 at Four Sisters Ranch, 1555 Lemond Rd. in Utopia.

For more information or to buy tickets, scan the QR code in the graphic below or click here:

https://www.preservethehillcountry.com

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Who gets to permit people to try to beat cops to death?

Who gets to reward insurrectionists, after they’ve been found guilty by juries of their peers or have pleaded guilty to their crimes, by pardoning them and then rewarding them with riches?

Donald Trump.

Just another thing he gets away with:

Heavy weight driving across floor of reflecting pool - it’s gonna leak

Splotch job? This is not going to reflect anymore.

Photos by MSN

Trump also approved of hanging then-Vice President Mike Pence. Of the suicide of four cops who were crushed by the knowledge that their president sent fully-outfitted thugs into the Capitol Building to attack them with flagpoles and fire extinguishers and bear spray, and then called the J6ers heroes.

On Jan. 6, insurrectionists yelled, “This is 1776!”

It’s as obvious as daylight.

How many of those J6ers now work as ICE agents? Are they members of the Oath Keepers? Proud Boys?

But we don’t know who works as ICE agents because it’s been turned into a secret police force.

And there are more secrets. This idiot, wasteful, heinous “weaponization fund” will be run by five men who are chosen by acting attorney general Todd Blanche (Trump’s personal defense attorney: “This guy’s kept me out of jail for years!” Trump said). Those five men will decide, in secret, who gets the money and how much. They won’t be accountable to the American taxpayers for who they pick to enrich, how much they enrich them with or what process they followed to do the picking and enriching.

$1.776 BILLION.

The American taxpayers already paid $2.7 BILLION to fix the Capitol building and conduct criminal hearings for Jan. 6.

J6ers had their day in court. They got due process. Many of them pleaded guilty.

There was no due process for the Capitol Police officers who are now permanently injured. Or dead. No due process for the Epstein victim/survivors, who are being revictimized over and over by the federal government. No due process for immigrants sent to concentration camps. No due process for US citizen murder victims Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and Ruben Ray Martinez of San Antonio, killed on South Padre Island.

No due process for the 1,200 girls - and some boys - trafficked in the Epstein global child sex crime ring.

Is money more important than lives?

Which is worse, Donald Trump murdering American citizens who criticise him or Donald Trump robbing American citizens of billions of dollars? Or deliberately sending innocent people to concentration camps known to torture their prisoners? Or blowing up people on small boats who are in international waters? Incinerating hundreds of schoolgirls in another country? Eliminating thousands of citizens in other countries? Palestine? Iran? Killing by proxy thousands more citizens in other countries - Africa (see USAID and anti-HIV drugs for children), Ukraine, Russia?

Murder aside, how about bankrupting America? Just like he bankrupted at least three casinos as part of his six bankruptcies in his earlier years? (How do you bankrupt a casino?) His father gave him the money to buy his first casino, and then when it was clear that it was going to fail, gave him another $300 million.

The US of A is facing a $2.1 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, up from $1.8 trillion in FY2025. We are now nearly $40 trillion in debt, thanks to Donald Trump. Guess who was the only president to create a surplus? Bill Clinton. He may be a cad but he knows how to handle money.

It is beyond comprehension how 70 million voters - and the legislature and the courts - have allowed this to come to be. We are in forever wars. We are watching people be tortured and murdered. We are drowning in debt. Cost of living has surged. A third of the White House has been torn down.

All while that prize sits in a gold leafed office. Or plays golf.

The theft/the grift

How about the corruption? Making tons of money from crypto. From trades. Protecting the Epstein Class - including himself - from prosecution. The whole thing with this slush fund is about a lawsuit he brought against himself and then, when the judge said prove your case, he withdrew. So then there was no lawsuit.

Yet despite there being no lawsuit, Trump initiated a “settlement” of $1.776 billion and an order allowing him and his family and his businesses to commit any tax crimes they desire.

The Independent: “The government will be ‘forever barred and precluded’ from pursuing IRS-related claims against Trump, his family or his businesses. The settlement shields the president from a potentially damaging ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million. The ruling could have stemmed from the IRS’ audit of Trump, which he has long cited as the reason he did not release his tax returns.”

“It remains unclear where that audit stood recently, though Eric Trump said it was still active in 2024. The audit centered on a nearly $73 million tax refund Trump claimed around 2010. Trump justified the refund by reporting steep business losses, largely tied to two ventures: his casino holdings and his Chicago skycraper. The IRS contended that Trump improperly claimed the same losses twice for the Chicago tower, where he reported losses of up to $651 million.”

This is a businessman?

Forbes also reported that immunity deal would save Trump more than $600 million on the roughly $1.4 billion he made in 2025 from crypto and licensing deals.

How about that? Would anyone else in this country get that kind of protection from criminality? And at taxpayer expense?

That fake lawsuit, by the way, was based on a leak of 400,000 tax returns by a government employee, one of which was Trump’s. It showed he paid $750 in income taxes. I forget which year. Maybe it was the only year he ever paid taxes.

The absolution document reads, “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization, “and is FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies.

But it’s just money, right? Grifting from the taxpayers?

That grift has bled into Trump’s cabinet as well (I won’t get into Kash Patel’s FBI-branded bottles of bourbon here): Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, in order to spend down its entire defense budget, spent $5.3 million for Apple devices including the new iPad, $2 million for Alaskan king crab, $6.9 million for lobster tail (Hegseth already spent more than $7.4 million on lobster tail in March, May, June and October), $15 million in September for ribeye steak, $124,000 for ice cream machines, $139,224 for donuts and $98,329 for a grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s personal home.

Millions and millions of dollars for snacks and toys for the Pentagon but only $183,000 in eminent domain funds for acreage belonging to a church to make way for the wall.

We could create policy and hire agents to guard the border (jobs!), but that doesn’t make money for defense contractors. It doesn’t garner votes for the politicians.

Ugly orange buoys do make money, however, as does razor wire (which gets thrown away when the river moves it. DHS just dumps it in scrapyards)

Buoys in the Rio Grande near El Paso

That church property, near El Paso, includes a mountain that pilgrims climb to reach a 29-foot statue of Jesus.

“Mt. Cristo Rey’s cultural and religious significance is central to our region,” said US Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso. “Seizing this community asset in order to build a border wall is consistent with the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for what communities like ours value. There are a number of other ways to provide border security. Instead, the Trump administration prefers to destroy this sacred site.”

See more details on the land grab here:

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/15/texas-cristo-rey-mountain-new-mexico-border-wall-lawsuit/

Somebody in the article said it would be fine to build more barriers. But the man is gaslighted into thinking that there are limits to Trump’s destruction, grift, theft and inhumanity. As Mary Trump says, “with Donald there is no ‘worst.’ There’s only ‘worse.’”

The man has also bought into the notion that immigrants are monsters ready to kill you. But that wouldn’t be immigrants. That would be J6ers. That would be Kyle Rittenhouse. That would be ICE agents. That would be Pete Hegseth.

Will Trump take money from that fund for himself? You decide:

“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just-announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go foward,” he posted. “I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune. Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Admin, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

He gave up a lot of money, eh?

The Trump Organization has 25 Trump properties being developed in 12 other countries, more than triple what he had before returning to office. There’s Trump Plaza in Jeddah ($1 billion), Trump International in Oman ($500 million), and a golf course in near Hinoi, Vietnam that its government has shoved through despite protests ($1.5 billion).

According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth is $6.1 billion, compared to $5.1 billion in 2025, $4.3 billion in 2024 and $2.4 billion in 2021.

Rachel Maddow noted that in January, Trump bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Nvidia. A week later, his Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China. Trump also bought $50,000-$100,000 worth of stock in AMD. A week later, Commerce allowed AMD to do business in China.

February saw Trump buy millions in Dell stock and nine days later, he told a crowd to buy a Dell computer. In March, he bought Thermo Fisher stock and followed up with a visit to Thermo Fisher to praise them.

Trump also bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Apple stock, followed by an event where he praised the company and its CEO Tim Cook. And he bought Micron stock, and called in to Fox to say how great the company is.

CNBC reported that Trump bought Palantir stock, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. Then he posted on his site how great Palantir is.

In energy, Trump issued an executive order saying the taxpayers would subsidize fusion power plants that employ “field-reversed configurations.”

The Trump Administration established an Office of Fusion in November.

Trump Media and Technology Group then announced a merger with TAE Tech, the fusion company that helped invent field-reversed configurations. And has developed aneutronic fuels, which these plants run on.

Meanwhile, Trump holds a 41% share of Trump Media and Technology Group (in trust, but he’s the sole beneficiary). The trust’s sole trustee is Donald Trump Jr., who is also on the TMTG board of directors.

Nothing to see here.

The Wall Street Journal reported that an audit will be done on a $38 billion scheme by DHS to buy warehouses for conversion to detention camps. Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are said to have paid 11-13% above market value for 11 vacant buildings.

The structures are not zoned for detention and are not plumbed for thousands of humans. Yet taxpayers have paid $1.7 billion to 50 contractors - with no experience - since Trump took office.

The lies

Trump’s payout slush fund is illegal, said Heather Cox Richardson. The president can’t just demand this money. He has to go through Congress first.

Moreover, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits paying money to insurrectionists. These rioters pleaded guilty or were found guilty of committing insurrection.

Another lie is that the US has total control of the Strait of Hormuz. It does not. It has zero control.

The strait was open before Trump started this fight. Now, Iran has turned it into a toll booth and enforces who goes through. Any notion that the US “will allow” Iran to charge tolls is fantasy. They’re doing it now and they will continue to do it from now on. We can’t make them do anything. It’s either lie that we are “allowing” them to charge tolls or keep gas prices high.

They’re not going to give up their nuclear program either. Iran will enrich uranium forevermore because they saw what we did to Ukraine (see the Budapest Memorandum).

Here’s another lie: Trump wanted to lift federal gas taxes to keep prices under $5 a gallon. He’s trying to fool you into thinking he’s winning in Iran because prices aren’t increasing anymore. That’s about the same as with eggs. We’re importing more eggs than in our history now, mostly from Brazil. So while the administration crows about low egg prices, it’s simply because it’s increased supply. Certainly not due to wise economic policy.

Speaking of supply, Trump is using up our strategic oil reserve to keep prices down. We used up 10 million barrels in a week just recently. Total reserve at that point was just under 375 million barrels.

And that old lie about 2020, the election that Trump lost fair and square. He tried to steal it by, among other things, pressuring the Georgia AG by claiming there were shredded ballots, suitcases stuffed with ballots, dead people and minors voting, and then the order to “find 11,780 votes.” Brad Raffensberger said there were no ballots to find. Election officials and the courts have debunked every one of Trump’s accusations.

See here:

2020 was the greatest election ever. More people voted than ever in the history of our country, during a pandemic, and it went off without a hitch. It was remarkable.

We should thank our election officials - at all our 7,000 polling places across the country - for the feat they accomplished. And stop calling them fraudsters and thieves. These are our neighbors and friends. Not criminals. They do it as a public service, to let us vote. Thank them.

The piggishness

Despite driving us into the poorhouse, Trump keeps spending like a drunken sailor. Easy to do when it’s somebody else’s money. Untold funds wasted on gold leafing the Oval Office. Painting the Reflecting Pool so it won’t reflect anymore. Building an arch that will loom over Washington, DC. Minting dollar coins with his face on it (yet we can’t have pennies, the cheapskate).

He gets a palatial mansion overlooking the sea, with no wind turbines ever to mar his view, while we get to look at a steel wall blocking our river.

He gets to declare bankruptcy and not pay his bills, you get to pay more for gas, groceries and electricity.

He cuts taxes for billionaires who use government services, you get to pay more for everything.

He doesn’t have time to attend his own son’s wedding (Don Jr.) while fighting a war and all that, but he does have time for weekly golf, to build a golden ballroom - wandering around the construction site chatting with reporters, calling high gas prices “peanuts” - driving across the reflecting “lake,” rebuilding the DC public golf courses.

He buried his first wife on a golf course to save property taxes. He’s a 32 time convicted felon. He’s an adjudicated rapist.

Trump handles this country with a total abdication of responsibility. He doesn’t care because he doesn’t have to.

The wall was supposed to be a huge win for America but has done nothing but destroy the land, cause heartache and loss and enrich contractors and politicians.

Fisher Sand and Gravel built a section of wall that immediately began to cause erosion (it was funded by We Build the Wall, which stole money from donors and ended with Steve Bannon and other board members going to prison. Trump pardoned Bannon before he served a day. Now he’s eligible to apply for that slush fund).

Today, Fisher has even more federal wall contracts ($9 billion), one of which is to build in Big Bend. Fisher got those jobs without having to compete for them, says a lawsuit.

In Trump’s first term, an investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune showed that the government was awarding contracts without owning the land, leading to huge overruns because of delays. The administration also massively modified contracts, increasing costs.

Meanwhile, the Big Bend project is causing much alarm, with property owners receiving letters that say the wall construction has already been contracted out and so it’s going to happen anyway. Might as well take that thousand bucks we’re offering you now.

With the upheaval, the Trump administration took down a map of the wall from its website and replaced it with a map of “vehicle barriers” and “patrol roads” instead of walls. So nobody knows what’s going to be built. With taxpayer money. That’s unacceptable. That’s not normal.

I guess what is normal is people holding their hands out when there’s money to be had. Like the J6ers. They’re already announcing that they will apply for that money.

Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys (sentenced to 22 years for senditious conspiracy) said he thought he could get $2-5 million.

J6er Andrew Paul Johnson was convicted this year of sexually abusing two 12-year-olds. He told them he would pay them some of the millions he expected to get from Trump if they remained silent.

Anders Aslund, Swedish economist and immigrant, said he is a US citizen but “I have never in my life been so disappointed with the US….the US people have elected a president who represent all the deadly sins. How could they do that? Are they so morally deprived?”

The seven deadly sins, according to the Catholic Church, FYI, are pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth and greed.

The cheat

We just can’t make that idiot quota of deporting 3,000 monsters every day so Trump has come up with another gem: foreigners who want a green card must leave and apply from their home country (green card holders are lawful permanent residents).

There are 12.8 million cardholders, 9 million of whom are eligible to become US citizens. 18,700 serve in the Armed Forces. I just bet that new order will also affect folks who already hold a green card. Hide and watch.

Another cheat has to do with Elon Musk’s Twitter. Leading up the 2024 election, there were millions of followers on left-leaning Twitter accounts. But they disappeared the day after the election and there’s no record of them ever existing.

“If you go back and look at analytics the day after the election….it does not show a change in followers,” said Ellie Leonard. “It does not show a change across the board. It shows that everybody stayed level. And it was hundreds of thousands to millions of followers that disappeared overnight, likely that were not real people. It was like some sort of bot system.”

Leonard noted that there already seems to be some connection between Musk and voting - in an investigation of the Epstein emails, journalist Kait Justice found that some voting machines have backup batteries that are connected to the internet, specifically via Starlink. Moreover, one of Musk’s baby mommas saw Musk with real-time voter data. No proof of wrongdoing but it should be enough to spark an investigation.

Another cheat, or sets of cheats, have to do with Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was jailed for prostituting minors - he was a pimp as well as a pedophile - yet Trump is preventing release of the names of those other predators. “Some of my friends might get hurt,” he said.

He is revictimizing the victims as well as rewarding his friends for letting thousands of girls’ lives be ruined. Trump is a bad, bad man, just as bad as his best friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein was allowed to roam free six days out of seven while serving a sentence of 18 months in jail (not even prison) for prostituting. Victims recalled that he wore an ankle monitor while he was molesting them. So he continued to commit crimes while serving his sentence and then went free another 10 years to molest more girls.

The federal government knew about Epstein in 1993. Over the next nearly 30 years, he ruined the lives of at least 1,200 girls and young women, and some boys too. The FBI and DOJ allowed him to do it. WHY?

Multiple administrations, from Clinton to Trump, have allowed this travesty to go on. Trump could stop it but he won’t. He doesn’t care. I’m sure he’s also afraid.

He might even pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s cohort who is as much a global child sex trafficker as Epstein and his buddies were. Are. Trump’s defense attorney, acting AG Todd Blanche, relocated Maxwell from a high security prison to a federal camp that doesn’t alllow sex criminals. Yet there she lives, in Bryan near Texas A&M, with a puppy and yoga classes and a prison guard to help her with the internet. Or write her emails. Or something.

Take a little time and watch this recent testimony from some of Epstein’s victim/survivors. You’ll see he set traps for these girls. For decades. And the feds did nothing.

Also interesting is how Customs and Border Protection never stopped the entry - or exit - of undocumented foreign girls whom Epstein was ferrying around. Yet another cheat. We can’t have illegal immigrants who work for us but we can have illegal immigrants who service rich old white men.

Funny how there’s money for the men who tried to kill cops, destroy the Capitol and overturn the US Government, but there’s no money for these women the US Government allowed to be abused. The J6ers “were treated so horribly,” Trump complained. But he has nothing at all for these women he is abusing.

His DOJ exposed the names of women who had never told their children, their spouses, their bosses, their students about the torture they endured. Trump’s DOJ made public things these women never wanted to reveal. That would include nude photos of one of them.

And now he’s preventing Pam Bondi from testifying under oath about her part in this travesty.

To see a sample of the Epstein files, click here:

The Panicked Writer

The Epstein Birthday Book (Transcribed) - Part 4

Trigger Warning: lewd sexual descriptions…

Read more

a year ago · 101 likes · 8 comments · Ellie Leonard

The harm

Global sex trafficking continues today. Journalist Gareth Gore recently wrote a book about the Opus Dei, an “abusive cult” that is accused of trafficking girls as “maids.” Slaves? It’s global, just like the Epstein ring.

Even Pope Leo was taken by Gore’s book, entitled “Opus.” He invited Gore to personally visit him at the Vatican to talk about what the Catholic Church is accused of.

Gore said in this interview that many Catholics see Opus Dei as a “necessary evil” because it pushes back against progressive policy. My stance is, if progressive means not abusing women then we need to practice being progressive.

The harm of the hubris

The triumphal arch Trump wants to build for himself would be built between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. It would block the view of the Lincoln Memorial, the man who brought us through the Civil War, but would frame Arlington House, the mansion built by slaves of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

“The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them,” said Heather Cox Richardson.

Read the rest of Cox Richardson’s story on how Memorial Day came about:

What do they think is going to happen

He’s talking about taking $1 billion taxpayer money for his ballroom, taking $2 billion taxpayer money to pay off those who attacked the capitol and creating a provision to immunize him from breaking tax law.

Cuba is in danger of us trying to impose a regime change, now, before the midterms (Marco Rubio wants this desperately).

Redistricting is tilting the election playing field toward white conservatives. Gutting the Voting Rights Act and changing registration requirements is making it hard for certain people to vote. Interestingly, those mostly affected are women and people of color, many of whom vote Democratic.

Predictably, Trump slapped Republicans in the Senate by throwing John Cornyn under the bus - and Cassidy in Louisiana too - and in Kentucky, Massie’s opponent spent an obscene $35 million in outside money. And won (a House primary election usually takes $100,000- 500,000 to conduct).

What would it look like to have a race run on merits rather than money?

The only reason for all this rigamarole is that Republicans are afraid the Democrats will win in the midterms. As they should be.

As bad as the Democratic establishment is, it doesn’t destroy people’s lives like the Republican establishment does. Republicans have decided that the party is more important than the country, and so refuse the check their Republican president.

They’re letting one man - a pathological liar and cheat who is just plain mean - run the US of A. And he’s driving it into the ground. He’s ruining everyone’s lives (except his, and his family’s, of course).

And remember the One Big Bully Bill? Some elements of it are already in place, but you’re going to see more damage after the midterms.

These cuts - and hikes - are purely Trump.

The debt ceiling gets raised by $5 trillion. Medicaid gets cut by 12%. Defense gets $150 billion in new money. Border enforcement gets another $150 billion. ICE goes from $10 billion to more than $100 billion by 2029.

The congressional budget office said this would increase the deficit by $2.8 trillion by 2034. Well. Our deficit has increased by $2.1 trillion in FY 2026. We’re now closing in on a $40 trillion deficit, folks, thanks to Donald Trump.

Because of cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, the lowest 10% of earners will see their incomes fall by 3.1% by 2034. The richest 10% get a 2.7% raise.

It’s the greatest upward transfer of wealth from poor to rich, ever.

Taxes on social security will not be eliminated (there’s only a temporary thing for a certain set of people), no tax on tips doesn’t count toward FICA. Illegal immigrants already are not eligible for Medicaid. And work requirements for Medicaid? 70 percent of recipients are already working.

Only about 3% of recipients are long-term unemployed who are able to work.

The One Big Bully Bill also makes permanent the $4 trillion in tax cuts for the very wealthy, including an increase to $15 million the exemption for federal estate tax, gift tax and generation skipping transfer tax. The top 1% of earners get an average tax cut of $50,000 a year.

And that’s just us Americans. Netanyahu is not happy that Iran is still as strong as ever, more radicalized than ever, even after finally convincing a US president to fight his fight for him. Karma.

Iran will get $25 billion in assets unfrozen, without ever making concessions on its nuclear program.

One solution

Leonard asked, what is our plan if Trump tries to cancel the 2028 election? It’s obvious he may try to use the war with Iran as an excuse to not hold elections. What do we do when he tries to do that?

“He’s hijacked this country and turned it into a racist, homophobic, xenophobic place and DC looks like a third world country,” she said, describing a propaganda banner on a building that says, “The Truth Will Set You Free.”

“Mind control,” she said.

Lev Parnas said that most Americans don’t want to be seen as Republican or Democrat (He’s right. I sure don’t).

Thing is, our laws don’t favor a third party, which is why you so rarely see an independent in office.

We need to change that, he said.

We talk about abolishing ICE, he said, not because we don’t need an immigration agency but because it’s infested with so much bad you can’t fix it. It needs to be rebuilt.

Same with our two-party system.

“We have to break the two-party system,” Parnas said. “We have to break their hold on us. The majority of Americans do not want to be associated with with one side or the other because each side is crazy in their way.”

The way to do that, he added, is to get both Republicans and Democrats in the legislature to vote to allow for a true third party.

Another thing: stop the PAC money, he said.

Dean Blundell said he would vote for whoever runs on a platform of: getting rid of the used Qatari plane; hunting down every Epstein a-hole that perpetrated sex crimes on children, in every country for as long as it takes to get them all; tearing down the ballroom and rebuilding the historic house; prosecuting every member of the Trump crime family, no matter if they’re Republican, Democrat, “or purple or pink,” Blundell said; nationalizing SpaceX and nationalizing Meta.

Blundell added that we need to put corruption on the ticket, and develop a merit-based government, not one that is based on how rich you are.

Maybe we can just replace Republicans and Democrats with folks who want to serve the people.

For the entire conversation, click here:

The Panicked Writer

Coffee w @LevParnas and Dean: @ellieleonard, Russia, Slush Fund, Oh My.

Listen now

3 months ago · 534 likes · 130 comments · Ellie Leonard, Dean Blundell, and Lev Parnas

How about a candidate like Lyndon Johnson, who led the creation of the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities, the Water Quality Act of 1964, compelled lenders to disclose the full cost of loans, led the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, created rent subsidies for the poor, and created the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

This country has done really great since then. All I see is how people became better off, year after year, for decades. Until Trump.

“I want to get rich and I don’t care that you are poorer” - Jessica Tarlov, political commenter, on Trump’s attitude.

RIP:

Ruben Ray Martinez, 2002-2025

Renee Good, 1988-2026

Alex Pretti, 1988-2026

Thanks to the many people who informed my narrative. This list is not in any order:

Ron Filipkowski, Meidas Touch

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American

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